Tony Tetro

Anthony Gene "Tony" Tetro ( born 1950 in Fulton (New York)) is an American art forger and copyist.

Tetro, the son of a master painter in New York, was active as a forger, especially in the 1970s and 1980s and was, in the words of the prosecutor in Los Angeles Ira Reiner in this time of greatest forger of works of art in the United States. His forgeries found worldwide inclusion in museums, galleries and auction houses. He falsified both old masters and contemporary painters, notably Salvador Dalí, Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Norman Rockwell. Mid -1980s, he was revealed when his client sold fake watercolors by Hiro Yamagata to a gallery in Beverly Hills, which was at a gallery in the immediate vicinity which had the exclusive sales rights of Yamagata. When the artist was there to visit, he discovered the forgeries. 1989 Tetro was convicted after a trial that lasted four and a half years to a prison sentence. In 1994 he was released and earned his living from then on only by the production of replicas of famous works of art, which he signed with his name.